Chapter 429: The Unbound

The raven came through the smoke at midday.

I did not see it arrive. Nobody did. One moment the sky over Greykeep was clear and cold and empty, and the next there was a column of gray smoke rising from the eastern battlements where nothing had been burning, and a black shape tumbling out of it onto the stone like something thrown.

Castellan's alarm sounded once.

Then stopped.

“It's not an attack,” the castle said, before anyone could reach for a weapon. “It's a messenger. And it's injured.”

By the time I reached the battlements, the raven was no longer a raven.

It was a man.

Lean and dark-haired, in a black coat torn along one sleeve and scorched across the back. He lay on his side on the stone with one arm curled against his chest, breathing in short hard gasps. Feathers clung to his hair and his collar, black and glossy, as though the change had not quite finished with him.

Two guards stood over him, uncertain.

Thor pushed past them and dropped to one knee.

“Saelis,” she said.

The man opened his eyes.

“Thor.” His voice was hoarse. “Good. I was aiming for you. I wasn't certain I'd hit.”

“You hit the battlements.”

“I hit the castle.” He tried to smile. “Close enough, for a bird with one wing.”

Then his eyes rolled back, and Thor caught his head before it struck the stone.

Evelyn reached him three minutes later.

His left arm was broken in two places. The burns across his back were not from fire. They were from silver wire, laid in lines, the way the binding rod at the arch had been wrapped. Caldris recognized the pattern at once.

“A capture net,” he said. “Thrown over him while he was flying.”

“He tore through it,” Thor said.

“He tore through most of it.” Caldris pointed to a line of raw flesh along Saelis's shoulder blade. “It held on long enough to do this.”

Evelyn's hands were already moving. Gold and blue light rose around her fingers.

Saelis woke under the healing.

He did not cry out. He looked up at Evelyn, then past her at Thor, and said:

“Carrow Tor.”

Thor went very still.

“How many?”

“Nine of us. Six who fight. Three who don't.” Saelis drew a breath that made him wince. “Two days ago we were twelve.”

“Who's holding the gate?”

“Brannoc.”

Thor closed her eyes.

“Of course he is.”

We met in the map room within the hour.

Saelis would not stay in the infirmary. Evelyn had set his arm and closed the worst of the burns, and he had thanked her very courteously and then gotten out of bed while she was speaking to Liora, and Liora had found him halfway down the corridor holding the wall.

Evelyn had looked at him for a long moment.

Then she had found him a chair with wheels.

Perrin had built it for Vaust, who refused to use it. Saelis did not refuse. He sat in it at the end of the map table with his splinted arm resting on a cushion and his black coat draped over his shoulders, and he told us.

They called themselves the Unbound.

Not because anyone had bound them. Because no one had, yet.

They were gods Othellos had tried to take and failed. Or gods who had seen what happened to others and refused to wait their turn. Some had been hiding in the mountain country east of the river since before Surtr crossed. Some had come together only in the last year.

“How did you find each other?” Mary asked.

“I found them,” Saelis said. “Messages are my domain. I carry them. I know who's trying to send one and can't.” He looked down at his splinted arm. “There were a great many gods trying to send messages that year. Most of them stopped.”

Nobody asked why.

There were nine left.

Saelis named them for us.

Brannoc, who held shields and shield-walls and the men who stood in them. Thor knew him. They had fought together, a very long time ago, in a war neither of them would discuss.

Kaedra, goddess of the hunt. An archer who could put an arrow through a binding rod at three hundred paces.

Tavros, who knew every mountain pass and goat track between the river and the eastern ridge. He could make an army lose its way in a valley it had marched into that morning.

Nyxa, who moved at night and was never quite where you looked for her.

Ishkar, god of the charge. The spear and the moment before the lines meet.

Oruun, who had been a god of forges before the war, and was now the god of breaking whatever the enemy built.

“And the three who don't fight?” Thor asked.

“Mireth,” Saelis said. “She mends. Wounds. Armor. Broken bones. She's kept the rest of us alive for a year.” His voice dropped. “She's very tired.”

“And?”

“Wenhild. Hearths. Provision. Wherever we camp, there's a fire that doesn't smoke and food that doesn't run out.” A faint smile. “We'd have starved months ago without her.”

“And the third is you,” I said.

Saelis nodded.

“Messages,” he said. “Scouting. Carrying word between us when we split up. Finding the supply columns.” He looked at the map. “Surtr's and Othellos's both. We've been raiding them for a year.”

He told us about the raids.

Not all of them. There were too many. But enough.

Surtr's timber wagons, burned on the north road before they could reach the river crossings. Othellos's prisoner convoys, stopped twice in the mountain passes, the cages broken open, the prisoners sent south along goat tracks Tavros knew.

“How many?” Eliza asked sharply.

“Sixty-three, over the year. Not all made it.” Saelis's face did not change. “Most did. We sent them toward the old shrine roads. Toward the shelters.” He looked at me. “We didn't know whose they were. We only knew that the roads felt safer there.”

The Keeper.

I looked at Thor.

She had gone very still.

“Some of the refugees who came to Westmere last spring,” she said slowly. “From the east. They said someone had freed them on the road and pointed them south. They didn't know who.”

“Kaedra, probably,” Saelis said. “She does the pointing. Brannoc does the shouting.”

“Why didn't you come to us?” I asked. “Before now. If you knew about Greykeep.”

Saelis looked at me for a long moment.

“We didn't know about Greykeep,” he said. “Not properly. We heard rumors. A king with a storm in his hand. A city that took in gods.” He shook his head. “Othellos spreads rumors too. Places that take in gods. We'd learned not to trust them.”

“And now?”

“Now there's a lamp in every window from here to the river,” Saelis said quietly. “I flew over them three nights ago. On the longest night. Thousands of them. I'd never seen anything like it.” He looked at the map. “I told the others when I got back. I said, wherever that is, it isn't his.”

“And then?”

“And then the next morning, Surtr found us.”

Carrow Tor was an old monastery.

Saelis drew it for us with his good hand. A cluster of stone buildings on a spur of rock above a river valley, with one approach from below and a sheer drop on the other three sides. A wall around the whole. A gate.

“We used it as a base,” he said. “Wenhild kept the fires. Mireth kept the wounded. We'd go out to raid and come back to it.”

“And Surtr found it.”

“Someone told him.” Saelis's jaw tightened. “One of the refugees we freed. We don't know who. We don't know whether they meant to. Othellos's binding officers can take a name from someone's mouth if they get close enough.”

Caldris nodded slowly.

“A compelled speaker,” he said. “We've seen it.”

“Surtr sent giants,” Saelis said. “Twenty. And Othellos sent officers with rods and nets. Forty of them, at least. Maybe more.” He looked at the drawing. “They came up the valley two days ago. We fought them at the bridge below the tor. We lost Faelan there.”

“Faelan?” Thor asked.

“God of rivers. He held the bridge while we fell back.” Saelis's voice did not waver. “And Corra, goddess of autumn. And Dun, who kept our horses. The nets took all three.”

Taken.

Not killed.

Taken.

“Now they're inside the tor,” Saelis said. “All nine of us. Six who fight, and three who don't. Brannoc's holding the gate. The giants can't get through it while he holds it, and the officers can't get close enough to use their rods while Kaedra's on the wall.”

“How long can he hold it?” Thor asked.

Saelis looked at her.

“You know Brannoc,” he said.

Thor closed her eyes again.

“Until he falls over,” she said.

“Until he falls over,” Saelis agreed. “Mireth's been keeping him standing. But she was already exhausted. And Wenhild's fire is going out. And Kaedra's arrows are running low.” His voice dropped. “I left yesterday morning. I flew through the smoke to get out. The nets caught me twice. I tore through both.”

He looked at the map.

At the drawing of a monastery on a spur of rock, with one gate and one god standing in it.

“I don't know if he's still standing,” Saelis said quietly. “I don't know if any of them are.”

Thor did not wait.

She stood up from the table, and her hand was already on Mjölnir.

“How far?”

“Four days by road. Two by dragon.”

“Too long.”

“Yes.”

Thor looked at Castellan's lights in the wall.

“Is there a gate?”

“Not at Carrow Tor,” the castle said. “But there is a gate at Ashfell, in the river country. Sixty miles south of the tor. It was one of the old kingdom's eastern stations. We restored it last summer.”

“Sixty miles,” Thor said.

“Forty minutes for a dragon,” Eliza said. “Less, if it's in a hurry.”

Thor turned to me.

I was already standing.

Evelyn caught me in the corridor.

She had followed me out of the map room. She did not stop me. She only walked beside me toward the armory, matching my pace, until we were out of earshot of everyone else.

“Carol and Garrick's birthday is in two days,” she said.

“I know.”

“You promised them.”

“I know.”

She stopped walking.

I stopped with her.

“I'm not asking you to stay,” Evelyn said. “I want you to know that. I would never ask you to stay while someone was standing in a gate waiting for help.” She took my hand. “I'm asking you to come back.”

“I'll come back.”

“For the birthday.”

“For the birthday.”

She looked at me for a long time.

“Don't promise it if you don't know,” she said quietly.

I thought about Brannoc, standing in a gate.

About Avarn's bridge, and the ford downstream.

About thirty riders on the western road, and a line of masons with nothing in their hands but lanterns.

“I know what I'm going to try to do,” I said. “Get them out. Bring them home. Not fight Surtr's whole army. Not chase anyone. Just open the gate and walk them through it.” I squeezed her hand. “If that takes two days, I'll be home for the birthday. If it takes longer—”

“Then you'll be home when it's done,” Evelyn said.

“Yes.”

She nodded slowly.

Then she pulled me into her arms and held on.

“Bring them home,” she said against my shoulder. “All nine. And then come home yourself.”

Adriana did not say anything when I told her.

She was sitting on the bed with Roderic, who had decided that afternoon that the only acceptable position in the world was lying across her knees with his feet in the air.

She looked at me for a long moment.

Then she held out her hand.

I took it.

Silver light rose around her fingers. Faint. Not the bright wall I had seen the day her power first woke. Something softer. Something that settled over my hand like a glove and then sank into my skin.

“What was that?” I asked.

“I don't know,” Adriana said honestly. “I think it's a refusal.”

“Of what?”

She held my gaze.

“Of you not coming home,” she said.

We left within the hour.

Thor. Avarn. Elyan. Melody, who had not asked. Eliza and twelve of her scouts. Caldris and Thesra, carrying a case of instruments Caldris had prepared after the arch for exactly this kind of moment: tools for cutting silver wire, unbinding nets, breaking the rods without releasing whatever they held.

Bruni, because Thor said giants needed to see a giant who was not afraid of them.

And two dragons.

Serevan, gold beneath his wings and copper along his tail, who had come to Greykeep as an envoy and stayed because, he said, the bakery near the eastern lodging court put too much honey in its buns and he had grown attached. And Aelune, whose mane looked white until the shade showed the silver in it, and who had not spoken more than ten words to me in all the months she had lived on the mountain behind the castle.

She spoke four of them now.

“Get on. We're late.”

Saelis came too.

Evelyn had said no. Saelis had thanked her very courteously and then asked whether he might be permitted to ride, since he would not be able to fly. Evelyn had looked at his splinted arm and his bandaged back and said that riding a dragon was very different from riding a horse.

“Yes,” Saelis said. “It's faster.”

Evelyn looked at me.

I looked at Saelis.

“They won't trust us,” he said quietly. “Not at first. Brannoc's been fighting for a year. He's seen Othellos's people come wearing friendly faces before.” He paused. “He trusts me.”

Evelyn closed her eyes.

“Fine,” she said. “But Liora goes with you. And if anything opens, you come straight back.”

Saelis inclined his head.

“As you wish, Saint.”

Evelyn gave him a look that made him sit up straighter in his wheeled chair.

The gate at Ashfell opened onto river country.

Low hills. Bare winter trees. A wide gray river running east to west below a village whose people stared at the dragons as they came through the arch and then, after a moment, went back to what they had been doing. Ashfell had been part of the kingdom for a year. It had seen dragons before.

Serevan and Aelune did not wait.

They took to the air the moment everyone was mounted, and the river country fell away beneath us.

I rode on Serevan's back with Thor and Saelis. Melody and Elyan rode Aelune, with Bruni hanging from her claws in a sling of chain that Perrin had once built for exactly this purpose and that Bruni had been trying to forget about ever since.

The others followed on horseback through the river country. They would arrive later. Hours later. If there was anything left to arrive for.

We saw the smoke first.

A thin gray column rising from a spur of rock above a river valley, exactly where Saelis had drawn it. As we came closer, I could see the monastery. Stone buildings. A wall. A gate.

And below the gate, the army.

Twenty giants. Saelis had been right about that. They stood in a loose ring around the base of the tor, massive and gray-skinned, some of them leaning on clubs taller than horses.

And among them, smaller figures in gray coats.

Othellos's officers.

More than forty. Nearer sixty. They had set up a line of wooden frames along the approach to the gate, black timber and pale metal, the same kind of frame I had seen through the arch on the wooded slope. Silver wire glinted along every edge.

And in the gate itself—

A single figure.

Broad-shouldered. Armored. Holding a great round shield in front of him so that it filled the entire gateway from post to post. Behind him, on the wall, a woman with a bow.

As we watched, one of the giants swung its club at the gate.

The shield took the blow.

The figure behind it staggered. Did not fall.

The giant swung again.

The figure staggered again.

Did not fall.

“Brannoc,” Thor said.

Saelis leaned forward on Serevan's back.

He put two fingers to his mouth and whistled.

It was not a human sound. It was a raven's call, harsh and high and carrying, and it went down the valley like an arrow.

On the wall, the woman with the bow turned.

She saw the dragons.

She raised her bow.

Then she saw Saelis, and her bow dropped, and she turned and shouted something down into the gate.

The figure behind the shield did not turn around.

But the shield moved, very slightly. Tilting. Just enough that the man behind it could see the sky.

Thor went first.

She did not wait for Serevan to land. She stepped off his back at a hundred feet, and Mjölnir came down with her, and when she struck the ground at the base of the tor between the gate and the nearest giant, the whole valley shook.

Lightning cracked outward from the impact.

The giant went over backward.

The line of officers broke.

Aelune came in low over the wooden frames. She did not breathe fire. She flew so close over them that the wind of her passing tore three frames out of the ground and sent them tumbling down the slope, silver wire snapping and sparking.

Bruni dropped from her claws onto the valley floor.

He stood up.

He was not as tall as Surtr's giants. He was not as broad. But he stood between them and the gate with his metal fingers flexing and his face set, and every giant in that valley stopped and looked at him.

One of them said something in a language I did not know.

Bruni answered in the same language.

The giant stared at him.

I learned later what Bruni had said.

He had told them that he held bridges, not gates. But that he would learn.

I went to the gate.

Serevan put me down on the wall beside the archer. She turned on me with an arrow nocked and drawn, aimed at my throat from three feet away.

“Who are you?”

“Uriah Grey.”

She did not lower the bow.

“The storm king.”

“Some people call me that.”

“Othellos calls you that.” Her eyes were hard. “He's sent people wearing your name before.”

Saelis dropped onto the wall behind me, his splinted arm held against his chest. Liora came after him, scrambling down from Serevan's back with her healer's bag.

“Kaedra,” Saelis said. “It's him.”

The archer looked at Saelis.

At his arm. At his scorched back.

At the dragons in the sky above the valley, and Thor standing in a ring of scorched earth below the gate, and Bruni facing down twenty giants with his hands empty.

She lowered the bow.

“Brannoc,” she said. “Below. He won't come off the gate.”

He would not.

I went down the inner stairs into the gateway and found him there, exactly where Saelis had said he would be.

He was enormous. Taller than Thor. Broader than Bruni. His armor was dented in a hundred places and split along one shoulder, and blood ran down from beneath his helm and dried in his beard. His shield was the size of a cart wheel, and it was cracked from rim to boss.

He was still holding it up.

Behind him, in the courtyard of the monastery, I could see the others. A woman with dark hair lying on a pallet beside a fire that barely smoked. Another woman kneeling over her, hands glowing faintly. A man with a spear, leaning against a wall with his eyes closed. A woman in black I could barely see, standing in the shadow of a doorway. A man with a hammer sitting on an overturned barrel, staring at nothing.

“Brannoc,” I said.

He did not turn around.

“I know who you are,” he said. His voice was rough. Exhausted. “Kaedra shouted it down.”

“We've come to get you out.”

“I'm holding the gate.”

“I know.”

“If I let go, they come through.”

“Thor's out there,” I said. “And a giant who holds bridges. And two dragons. Nobody's coming through.”

Brannoc did not move.

“I've heard that before,” he said quietly. “At the bridge below the tor. Faelan said he'd hold it while we fell back. He said nobody was coming across.”

I did not say anything.

“They took him,” Brannoc said. “The nets. Right off the bridge. I was fifty paces away. I couldn't reach him.”

Avarn came down the stairs behind me.

I had not known he was there. He must have come over the wall from Aelune's back while I was talking to Kaedra.

He did not say anything at first.

He walked past me, into the gateway, until he was standing beside Brannoc. He looked at the cracked shield. At the blood in Brannoc's beard. At the hands on the shield's grip, white-knuckled, shaking with the effort of holding it up.

“I held a bridge once,” Avarn said.

Brannoc's eyes moved toward him.

“I beat every soldier who reached me,” Avarn continued. “None of them forced me back.” He paused. “While I held it, mounted men found a ford downstream. They took the people I was holding the bridge for.”

Brannoc said nothing.

“I've thought about that bridge every day since,” Avarn said. “I've thought about what I should have done. And I learned something, a few weeks ago, from a man who stood on a road and didn't draw his sword.” He looked at me, then back at Brannoc. “Sometimes holding the gate isn't the same as protecting what's behind it.”

Brannoc's jaw tightened.

“You want me to let go.”

“I want you to let us hold it,” Avarn said. “So you can carry them out.”

He nodded toward the courtyard.

Toward the woman on the pallet. The healer kneeling over her. The man with the spear and the woman in black and the man on the barrel staring at nothing.

“They're the reason you're standing here,” Avarn said quietly. “Go and get them.”

Brannoc did not move for a long time.

Then, very slowly, he lowered the shield.

It fell against the gatepost with a crack that echoed through the archway.

Avarn stepped into the gap.

He did not raise his sword. He only stood there, in the gateway, with his hands at his sides.

Outside, the giant that had been swinging at the gate looked at him.

At the god standing alone in the archway, unarmored, unshielded, his sword still sheathed.

The giant hesitated.

Thor's voice came from the valley below.

“That one's mine,” she said pleasantly. “If you want him, you'll go through me first.”

The giant looked at Thor.

At Bruni beside her.

At the two dragons circling overhead.

It lowered its club.

Brannoc turned around.

He looked into the courtyard.

Then he walked across it, slowly, his armor scraping, until he reached the pallet by the fire.

The woman lying on it was dark-haired and very pale. Her eyes were closed. The healer kneeling over her had stopped glowing. Her hands rested on the dark-haired woman's chest, still.

“Mireth,” Brannoc said.

The healer looked up.

She was gray-haired and gaunt, and her eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion. She looked at Brannoc. Then past him, at me, and Liora behind me with her bag.

“Wenhild,” Mireth said quietly. “Her fire went out an hour ago. She'd been keeping it lit with her own strength. I couldn't—” She stopped. “I couldn't keep both of them going. Her and Brannoc. I chose Brannoc.”

She looked down at the woman on the pallet.

“She told me to,” Mireth whispered. “She said the gate mattered more.”

Liora was already kneeling.

Her hands went to Wenhild's throat. Her wrist. Her face went very still with concentration.

“She's alive,” Liora said. “Barely.”

Mireth made a sound I will not try to describe.

“Can you—”

“Not here,” Liora said. “Not alone.” She looked up at me. “She needs Evelyn. She needs Aurelia. She needs to be somewhere warm with people who can hold her while she rests.” Her voice was steady. “She needs to go home.”

Brannoc picked her up.

He did it very carefully. The way Bruni lifted children. The way Aurelia held Roderic.

He held Wenhild against his chest, her head on his shoulder, her dark hair spilling down over his ruined armor.

He looked at me.

“Home,” he said. “Where?”

“Greykeep.”

“The city with the lamps.”

“Yes.”

Brannoc looked down at the woman in his arms.

Then he turned and walked back toward the gate, where Avarn still stood in the archway with his sword sheathed and his hands at his sides.

The others followed.

Ishkar, with his spear, limping. Oruun, who had to be helped off his barrel and who looked at Bruni through the gateway with an expression of slow, dawning recognition. Nyxa, who stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and walked beside Mireth without speaking.

Tavros came last.

He had been on the far wall. I had not seen him. He was thin and weathered and dressed in clothes that looked as though they had been made from the mountain itself, and he walked to the edge of the gateway and stopped.

He looked out at the valley.

At the giants. At Othellos's officers, regrouping behind their broken frames. At Thor and Bruni and the dragons.

“They'll follow us,” he said.

“Let them,” Thor called from below.

Tavros looked down at her.

“You don't understand,” he said. “There's one road out of this valley. They'll be on it before we reach the bottom.”

Thor looked up at him.

“How many roads are there,” she asked, “for someone who knows the mountains?”

Tavros was quiet for a moment.

Then something changed in his weathered face.

“Seventeen,” he said.

“Then pick one,” Thor said, “that dragons can follow.”

We left Carrow Tor by a goat track I would never have seen.

Tavros led. He did not hurry. He walked ahead of us up a narrow cleft in the rock behind the monastery, so narrow in places that Brannoc had to turn sideways to carry Wenhild through it. Above us, Serevan and Aelune circled.

Thor and Bruni held the gate behind us.

They did not fight. Not really. They stood in the gateway and let the giants look at them, and the giants looked, and did not come.

The officers tried once.

They brought up one of the frames, silver wire glinting, and aimed a rod at the gateway.

Kaedra put an arrow through the rod at three hundred paces from the top of the cleft.

They did not try again.

When the last of us was through, Thor and Bruni backed out of the gateway, slowly, and followed us up the cleft.

Nobody followed them.

The goat track came out on a high saddle of rock above the valley.

Serevan and Aelune were waiting.

Tavros stopped at the edge of the saddle and looked back down at Carrow Tor. At the smoke still rising from the courtyard where Wenhild's fire had been. At the army below, still standing in its ring around a gate nobody was holding.

“We lived there a year,” he said quietly.

“I know,” Saelis said.

“It felt like a home.”

“I know.”

Tavros was silent for a moment.

Then he turned his back on it.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

Saelis looked at me.

I looked at Brannoc, holding Wenhild against his chest. At Mireth, leaning on Liora's arm. At Kaedra with her bow and Ishkar with his spear and Oruun walking beside Bruni, the two of them talking in low voices about hammers. At Nyxa, who was standing close beside Mireth, as though she had decided that the healer would not be left alone again.

“Somewhere that will keep the lamp lit,” I said.

We were back at Ashfell by nightfall.

Back at Greykeep two hours after that.

Evelyn was waiting in the receiving hall.

She did not say anything when she saw me. She saw Brannoc behind me, carrying Wenhild, and her face went very calm, and she crossed the hall without hurrying and laid her hand on Wenhild's forehead.

Gold and blue light rose.

Wenhild's eyes opened.

She looked up at Evelyn.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

“Evelyn,” my wife said. “You're in Greykeep. You're safe. You can rest now.”

Wenhild looked past her. At the receiving hall. At the lamps that were still burning in every window, days after the observance, because nobody in Greykeep had wanted to put them out.

“Oh,” she said softly. “It's warm.”

Then she closed her eyes and slept.

Aurelia came within the hour.

She sat beside Wenhild's bed in the infirmary and did not leave. When Mireth tried to take over, Aurelia looked at her and said, very gently:

“You've been keeping everyone alive for a year. Who's been keeping you?”

Mireth stared at her.

Then she sat down very suddenly on the edge of the next bed, and put her face in her hands, and Nyxa sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, and Aurelia kept her hand on Wenhild's forehead and did not say anything else.

I found Brannoc in the garden.

He was sitting on the bench beside Fenrir. The great wolf had his head on his paws. Brannoc had taken off his helm. His face beneath it was broad and scarred and very tired.

He did not look up when I sat down.

“Faelan,” he said. “Corra. Dun.”

“Taken.”

“By the nets. At the bridge.” He looked at his hands. “They're somewhere in his hall now. Somewhere behind his doors.”

I did not say anything.

“Thor told me,” Brannoc said quietly. “About the courtyard. The bakers. The girl who walked out because somebody lit a lamp for her.” He shook his head. “I don't understand it.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Not entirely.”

“But it happened.”

“It happened.”

Brannoc looked up at the windows of Greykeep. At the lamps still burning.

“Then I'll learn,” he said. “What it means. How it works.” His jaw tightened. “And then we'll go and get them.”

“Not through his doors.”

“Not through his doors,” Brannoc agreed. “Thor said that too. Some third way.” He looked down at Fenrir. “She said the floor talks.”

Fenrir opened one eye.

“It does,” the wolf said. “You'll get used to it.”

I went to the nursery last.

It was very late. The children were asleep. Carol and Garrick in their beds. Lirien between Carol and Seraphina, who had stayed the night again because Io had decided that any night Lirien wanted company was a night Seraphina could stay.

The lamp in the hall was lit.

I sat down on the floor beside Carol's bed.

She stirred.

Opened her eyes.

“Papa?”

“I'm here.”

“Did you bring them home?”

I looked at her.

“Who told you?”

“Mama.” Carol yawned. “She said you went to get some gods who were in trouble. She said you'd be back for my birthday.”

“I'm back.”

“Did you bring them?”

“Nine of them,” I said.

Carol considered this.

“Is that a lot?”

“It's enough.”

Carol nodded sleepily.

“That's good,” she said. “Because my birthday's tomorrow.”

I looked at the window.

The sky outside was already beginning to gray.

“Today,” I said. “It's today.”

Carol's eyes opened very wide.

“Today?”

“Today.”

She sat bolt upright in bed.

Across the room, Garrick sat up too, as though some silent signal had passed between them.

“Today,” Garrick said.

“Today,” Carol agreed.

They both looked at me with identical expressions of pure, incandescent joy.

Then Lirien, between Carol and Seraphina, opened her eyes and looked up at all of us.

“What's today?” she asked.

Carol turned to her.

“We're three,” she said.

Lirien looked at Carol. At her height. At her long legs and her serious face.

“You don't look three,” Lirien said.

“I know,” Carol said. “But I am.”

Lirien considered this.

“I'm four,” she said.

Carol looked at her.

At how small she was. At her short-cut hair and her flour-sack blanket.

“You don't look four,” Carol said.

Lirien thought about it.

Then, for the first time since she had come through the arch at Greykeep, she laughed.

It was a small laugh. Rough. As though she had forgotten how and was trying to remember.

Carol laughed too.

So did Seraphina, waking up between them.

And Garrick, across the room.

And somewhere down the hall, in his cradle beside Adriana's bed, Roderic woke at the sound of all that laughter and added his own opinion on the matter, loudly.

I sat on the nursery floor in the gray dawn light and listened to all of it.

Nine gods asleep in the infirmary.

Twelve guests asleep in the lodging court.

A woman to the east with a lamp in her window, waiting for word of her daughter.

And five children laughing in a room with the door left open and a light burning in the hall.

I had promised Evelyn I would come home.

I was home.